Shuffle, shuffle, limp, limp. That’s not the shambling gait of the zombie hordes in George Romero’s “Survival of the Dead,” but the draggy pace of the movie itself.
Romero gave us a brilliant metaphor for social decay in “Night of the Living Dead,” a cheap, unrelenting 1968 shocker that still carries a visceral punch.
At the time, horror films were concerned with cobwebby gothic castles and monsters that could be banished with a crucifix or a silver bullet. Romero’s contemporary nightmare put its besieged survivors under a double threat, from reanimated cannibals and the trigger-happy simpletons gunning them down.
While the zombie genre has spun off some fine spinoffs and remakes (from the intense “28 Days Later” films to the uproarious “Shaun of the Dead” and “Zombieland”), Romero’s four sequels are a study in diminishing returns.
As much a social critic at heart as a dramatist, Romero has used the zombie apocalypse as the framework for message movies satirizing rampant consumerism, social inequality and media addiction.
In 1978’s dead cool “Dawn of the Dead” melded acid commentary and gory splatterfest: Scores of corpses rode shopping mall escalators in an aimless loop and shuffled the corridors to Muzak.
Sadly, the plodding, misshapen “Survival” adds no fresh blood to a series badly in need of transfusion.
Here, a National Guard squad gone maverick heads for safety on bucolic Plum Island off the Delaware coast. The land there is divided between feuding clans. There are the warlike O’Flynns, whose patriarch, Patrick (Kenneth Welsh) believes the only good zombie is a head-shot zombie. And there are the Muldoons, whose leader, Seamus (Richard Fitzpatrick), wants to educate the risen dead and interest them in foodstuffs other than fresh human giblets.
Since the only ghouls in the isolated island are relatives of each man, their disagreement takes on strong personal overtones. The National Guard newcomers find themselves middlemen in a generationslong blood feud.
I suppose this could be interpreted as a forced Iraq War parable, but really, why bother? The explosive “28 Weeks Later” made that very point thrillingly three years ago.
The film is destined for a quick, painful box-office death and a lonely afterlife on Netflix.
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